In their majority, contemporary fingerprint identification and verification systems are personal computer based and use standard general purpose video frame grabbers to acquire images from fingerprint image scanner devices. Those video frame grabbers are designed to acquire video signals from various types of video sources. Changes to acquisition parameters are done manually through the video grabber software manager. This, however, does not allow the automation of some particular operations essential for proper acquisition of fingerprint images, like the automatic adjustment of the offset and measurement range of the video analog to digital converter to compensate the differences between acquired images and automatic finger placement detection. The whole acquired image is usually digitized and saved in memory, even if only part of it is necessary for the particular application. Also the acquired frames are always saved in memory as grey scale images and if the application requires a line art (black and white) image, it has to be converted additionally, which wastes computer time, especially in real time applications. There is also usually not much control over which and how many frames to skip and respectively acquire.